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•vx Editors' Introduction to the Series

othcrs, whether małe or female. It was an astonishing assertion, boldly madę to an audience as large as all Europę.

THE TREATISES. Humanism provided the materials for a positive counterconcept to the misogyny embedded in scholastic philosophy and law, and inherited from the Greek, Roman, and Christian pasts. A series of humanist treatises on marriage and family, on education and deportment, and on the naturę of women helped construct these new perspectives.

The works by Francesco Barbaro and Leon Battista Alberti, re-spectively On Marriage (1415) and On the Family (1434-37), far from de-fending female equality, reasserted women s responsibilities for rearing children and managing the housekeeping while being obedient, chaste, and silent. Nevertheless, they served the cause of reexamining the issue of women s naturę by placing domestic issues at the center of scholarly con-cern and reopening the pertinent classical texts. In addition, Barbaro em-phasized the companionate naturę of marriage and the importance of a wifes spiritual and mental qualities for the well-being of the family.

These themes reappear in later humanist works on marriage and the education of women by Juan Luis Vives and Erasmus. Both were moder-ately sympathetic to the condition of women, without rcaching beyond the usual masculine prescriptions for female behavior.

An Outlook morę favorable to women characterizes the nearly un-known work In Praise of Women (ca. 1487) by the Italian humanist Bar-tolommeo Goggio. In addition to providing a catalogue of illustrious women, Goggio argued that małe and female are the same in essence, but that women (reworking from quite a new angle the Adam and Eve narra-tive) are actually superior. In the same vein, the Italian humanist Mario Equicola asserted the spiritual equality of men and women in On Women (1501). In 1525, Galcazzo Flavio Capra (or Capella) published his work On the Excellence and Dignity of Women. This humanist tradition of treatises defending the worthiness of women culminates in the work of Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, On the Nohility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. No work by a małe humanist morę succinctly or explicitly presents the case for female dignity.

THE WITCH BOOKS. While humanists grappled with the issues per-taining to women and family, other learned men turned their attention to what they perceived as a very great problem: witches. Witch-hunting man-uals, explorations of the witch phenomenon, and even defenses of witches are not at first glance pertinent to the tradition of the other voice. But they do relate in this way: most accused witches were women. The hostility aroused by supposed witch activity is comparable to the hostility aroused by women. The evil deeds the victims of the hunt were charged with were exaggerations of the vices to which, many believed, all women were prone.

The connection between the witch accusation and the hatred of